2018

EU Lead Factory wins Best IMI Communication Product Award

Yesterday the European Lead Factory animation won the best Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) Communication Product Award. The awards were handed out as part of IMI’s 10th anniversary during the IMI Scientific Symposium in Brussels.

Keapstone Therapeutics secures further €1,1 million investment from Parkinson’s UK

Keapstone Therapeutics is preparing to make the next steps in clinical candidate selection and first-in-human studies. This investment brings the total seed investment to € 2,4 million. Last year Parkinson’s UK together with Sheffield University launched the virtual biotech Keapstone Therapeutics to further develop compounds that boost the internal cellular defence mechanisms against oxidative stress to combat neurogenerative diseases. These compounds were discovered by IMI’s European Lead Factory.

The European Lead Factory contributing to the fight against Alzheimer's

The key goal of ELF is to create validated hit series. Another successful ELF programme aimed at identifying small molecules for the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease has culminated in the most potent compound yet identified by the ELF team at Newhouse, Scotland with the most active compound reaching 100pM. These compounds also have excellent physicochemical properties.

High number of SMEs benefit greatly from the European Lead Factory

The European Lead Factory is remarkably attractive for SMEs. The consortium consists of 30 partners, of which 10 are SMEs. They perform the screening and help to translate innovative design ideas into industry‐standard compound libraries. ELF is also interacting with a high number of SMEs who have enrolled via the target crowdsourcing route with in total 25 programmes (out of 88 programmes in the portfolio).

European Lead Factory reaches milestone of 200,000 novel compounds

Within a period of five years, the European Lead Factory (ELF) has reached one of its goals by completing the Public Compound Collection (PCC), comprising a commendable total of 200,000 novel compounds. The library production partners collaborated closely with the academic groups within ELF to reach this goal. The pan-European Public Chemistry Consortium is duly celebrating the achievement of this challenging objective.

On 16 and 17 April 2018 the European Lead Factory (ELF) Target Owner Workshop and Stakeholder Meeting took place in the heart of Europe, Brussels. An exciting row of speakers allowed for a retrospect on five years of successfully seeding and nursing innovative drug discovery projects. It also gave a hint about the future and how we can further grow the successful ELF platform to serve drug discovery for priority medicines.

On April 19, Prof Adam Nelson, University of Leeds, won the UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry. This award was established to acknowledge and recognise outstanding research in the field of Medicinal Chemistry, and is the most prestigious prize an academic medicinal chemist can get.

The future of the European Lead Factory – preparing the next phase

As a public-private partnership, the European Lead Factory (ELF) has already been instrumental in boosting early drug discovery. Its continuing goal is to offer unrivalled opportunities for the discovery of new lead drug lead molecules – to public and private organisations – in order to address unmet medical needs.

Servier and Scandicure enter into agreement to conduct research in the field of metabolic diseases

Paris and Gothenburg, 3 April 2018 – Servier, an independent international pharmaceutical company, and Scandicure, a Swedish spin-out of the University of Gothenburg, today announced the establishment of an agreement to exploit Scandicure’s innovation in the field of metabolic disease.

Memorandum of Understanding between REDEFAR and ELF strengthens European connections

Prof Mabel Loza, coordinator of REDEFAR, the Spanish Network of Excellence in Drug Discovery, and the European Lead Factory executives Dr Dimitrios Tzalis and Dr Ton Rijnders have signed a Memorandum of Understanding for collaboration in future initiatives.

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The research leading to these results has received support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n' 115489, resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7 / 2007-2013) and EFPIA companies' in kind contribution.